Monday, February 8, 2016

The
average jazz listener is likely to come up short if asked to name the jazz
pianist who began their musical career in the 1920s and, aside from a couple
breaks, didn’t stop performing until their death in 1981; who started out
playing stride piano and writing big band arrangements; who played a role in
helping many of the bebop players solidify their concepts; who encouraged the
gospel of jazz – often literally – in both Europe and the U.S.; and who
continually refined their approach to the music, including ideas that would
even encompass events as far out as performing a controversial 1977 two-piano
concert alongside unrepentant avant-gardist Cecil Taylor. A good (though incorrect)
guess would be Duke Ellington, who covers most of the time span in question,
but the correct answer is the underappreciated jazz great Mary Lou Williams.

Williams began playing piano at age
6 and by the time she was 19 she was writing arrangements for Andy Kirk’s
Clouds of Joy in Kansas City (and later New York), a gig she held until the
early 40s when she began playing matron to the rising stars of bebop. From an
interview for Melody Maker she noted "During
this period Monk and the kids would come to my apartment every morning around
four or pick me up at the Café after I'd finished my last show, and we'd play
and swap ideas until noon or later." Anyone who refers to Thelonious Monk,
Dizzy Gillespie and Bud Powell (to name only three of the musicians she coached
and traded ideas with) “the kids” deserves a much greater status than Williams
currently holds. But she didn’t just teach them, she took their ideas to heart
and in her mid-40s work – notably 1945’s Zodiac
Suite – you can hear bebop’s influence on her own playing.

In 1952, Williams began performing
and living in Europe for two years, going on a hiatus from performing music
upon her return to the States to focus on charity work within the Roman Catholic
Church – specifically on helping addicted musicians kick drugs and return to
performing. But by the late 50s, at the urging of two priests and Dizzy
Gillespie, she returned to playing and before long was creating some of the
most creative work of her career, blending her spiritual leanings with jazz,
including two modernist masterworks: Mary
Lou’s Mass and Black Christ of the
Andes, both of which show an enormous grasp of different styles of music
and a readiness to make her music challenging when she saw fit to do so.

After focusing mainly on live
performances and working with children’s choirs throughout the rest of the
1960s the 70s found her recording in earnest, starting with the 1974 release, Zoning. It’s a great record, but that’s
not all it is – like much of Williams’ latter-day work, this record encompasses
a history of jazz that she was present for at every turn. Most of the record
finds her working in one of two trios – a traditional piano-bass-drums group
and contrasting with that a piano-bass-congas group – though on some cuts she
plays solo, or in duo with one of the trio players. And on a couple cuts, she
looks forward to her live date with Cecil Taylor by featuring a second pianist
(Zita Carno) alongside her, creating some of the loosest, freest, and most
abstract music on the record. It opens easy enough though, with the funky, driving
bonus track “Syl-O-Gism” which was not on the original album. In listening,
it’s difficult to imagine that anything but time constraints kept this off the
record’s initial release. It’s followed immediately by Dizzy Gillespie’s
lovely, reflective “Olinga,” featuring the same trio instrumentation, and that
is in turn followed by “Medi II” which pushes the tempo back up to a rocketing
speed. Williams’ interfacing with the bop crowd is readily evident in her
playing here. The other bonus cut “Gloria” is the piano-bass-drums alternate
version of the tune that occurs later in the disc and again – quality is not in
question; it can only be the physical limitations of putting music on an LP
that kept this slower version of the tune off the original release. Two
dual-piano tracks follow: “Intermission” finds Williams and Carno working in
unison before stretching out on this fragmentary and impressionistic tune, but
the oddly-titled “Zoning Fungus” opens with a very loose and abstract
pianos-only intro before the rhythm section drops in a tight groove for them to
work against. The record is then given over to two piano/bass duos, with Mary
Lou and Bob Cranshaw playing the lovely “Holy Ghost” and the bluesier and
sometimes mildly dissonant “Medi I.” The bluesiness of “Medi I” gives way to
the slow, funky, in the pocket groove of “Rosa Mae” which in turn leads to the impressionistic
solo piano ballad “Ghost of Love.” The three tracks that close out the record
all feature the piano-bass-congas trio, starting with the fastest number here:
“Praise the Lord,” in which the rhythm section sets up a fast tempo then
Williams drops into it and effortlessly finds her place. She’s not often given
to showy runs in her solos, preferring instead to hitting the right note or phrase
at exactly the right time – not unlike that “kid” Monk that she used to talk
with. The originally released version of “Gloria” follows, faster than the
earlier one on the album, and every bit as good and fun. The record closes with
“Play It Momma,” a slow groover that is – as usual – funky and showcases
Williams’ exquisite timing. A perfect ending to a great album.

Williams would make more records
through the remainder of the 1970s (many of them worth seeking out), teach
music at Duke University, perform at the White House, create the Mary Lou
Williams Foundation to help the underprivileged and young find their way to
jazz, and then pass away in 1981 of bladder cancer. In her biography Morning Glory: A Biography of Mary Lou
Williams she would sum up her long and accomplished life with this simple
statement that says it better than anything I could add: "I did it, didn't
I? Through muck and mud."